


dreaming like silver

by ProfessorESP



Series: Color Palettes [2]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Character Study, Gen, I have Feelings about Zeetha & so should you, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, wow i can't wait until we get to skifander and all of this gets jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 07:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14848493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessorESP/pseuds/ProfessorESP
Summary: People always told Zeetha to bare the marks her sword sisters gave her with pride; her biggest defiance was wearing her twin's touch just as openly.





	dreaming like silver

People don’t like twins. Children should come into the world blank and empty. Their first marks should come from laying across their mother’s breast, and curling a tiny hand around their father’s pinky. There are many reasons given for why: they must let go of their past life, they must devote themselves to their parents above all else, they must possess a new soul. But all agree; twins are unnatural. 

They are born marked, and that is what damns them.

* * *

 

Zeetha was born first. She knows this for certain, because she asked. It was the first and only time her mother acknowledged her second child in Zeetha’s hearing.

She can’t see the shape her brother left her. Her mother’s mark stretches down her side in royal blue, and her father’s finger draws a line of storm cloud grey across her palm, but the twin’s touch staining her back is impossible to see no matter how hard she twists and turns. 

She knows the color, at least. Her mother bears two crescents, one under each breast. The left is Zeetha’s cerulean blue, as bright as powdered dye, but the right is an ocean dark teal. She wears them openly, every day. Zeetha thinks sometimes it might be her way of mourning. Her father’s soul mark is hidden in the handprints and knuckle marks that cover her mother’s body like a fafflenarg beast’s spots, but she rubs her arm often, when she thinks no one is looking, and Zeetha thinks that might be mourning, too.

* * *

 

People in Europa always seem shocked at Zeetha’s collection of soul marks along her arms. They assume they’re bruises until she spends enough time in their company for them to realize they aren’t going to fade. The people here can’t seem to comprehend meeting a kindred spirit, a soul mate, in any violent manner. 

Zeetha wants to grab them by their shirts and shove her arm against their throats and say: look here at the hands of my sword sisters, at the guidance of my aunts, at the lessons of my cousins. Look at how every fight changed me, how every opponent made me grow. Look at my skin and tell me that my country and my family and my soul mates are just a fever dream.

She does not. She shrugs and smiles and jokes and lets their gazes grate on her and longs for a way home.

She gains no soul marks, those three years.

* * *

 

She is afraid to touch Agatha, at first. To become kolee-dok-zumil is not a choice made lightly, and she has seen too many women in her family whose zumil bore light, watery marks. When the wings on Agatha’s shoulders come out the same dye-bright blue as is on her mother, Zeetha is relieved. 

The velvet-dark stripes that the slide of Agatha’s fingers leave on her wrists turn her fragile. She’s never seen a kolee who didn’t carry a heavy mark from their zumil. It shouldn’t break her like this. But she turns her arms back and forth in the lamplight that night, feeling shattered and soaked through, like a waterfall in winter. 

She has gained no soul marks, these past three years. Agatha is the first.

* * *

 

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach has two marks that match Zeetha’s shade for shape. His mother’s mark and father’s fingers mirror hers perfectly, his colors diluted where hers are saturated and vice versa. He sleeps on his back, so she can’t check to see if he bears a twin’s touch in her own shade of blue. 

She could roll him over, but that would involve skin to skin contact. She’s afraid to find out she was wrong before she even gets the chance to look.

Instead she stares at his other marks. He only has three, one on each arm and a third on his neck. The emerald green fingerprints splayed across the meat of his palm are Agatha’s. They match Zeetha’s own handprint in both shade and intensity, which pleases her. She can’t tell in the low light, but the climber’s vice encircling his wrist looks like the same tyrian red as Agatha’s new mark, left by her treacherous prince. Two bloodstain brown hands circle his neck, the thumbprints placed right on top of his jugular. That makes her smile. She doesn’t often see soul marks that remind her of home.

* * *

 

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach thinks she was sent to kill him. Gilgamesh Wulfenbach has her mother’s dark eyes. Gilgamesh Wulfenbach’s entire back is covered in cerulean blue. 

* * *

 

She doesn’t see the marks that Higgs left her until after, until he points them out, until he digs his nails into them as she tries her best to ruin him. The rust red line of an arm, running across the backs of her thighs, ending in a broad palm and knobby knuckled fingers. 

He likes it, she knows, even if he doesn’t like how she got it. He thinks it’s a way for him to hold her up, even when he’s gone. And he is often gone. 

When she finds the dark chasm of melancholy creeping up on her again, she digs her nails into every fingerprint and knuckle mark she has, working her way down her arms, remembering the faces and hands that gave them. Then she drags her hands back up, remembers the cerulean line on his arm, and thinks of this man she will come to love, when her heart is not so heavy. 

She gains no soul marks, those next three years. 

**Author's Note:**

> As before, this concept (I believe) was originally started by [lady_ragnell,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2121813) but [sprx77's version](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8039425/chapters/18412138%22) is what inspired me to be _thematic_ about it. Soul marks are made via skin to skin contact, but some of the canon comic panels have been handwaved for drama  & thematic reasons. [(Agatha](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20050216) and [Higgs,](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20110208) for reference). Gil's soul mark that Zeetha can't identify is from Dupree. It seemed appropriate.


End file.
